Q1: Hi, Kevin! You’ve got a great TOC blog with some excellent advice and stories. I’d
like to come back to some of those stories, but first can you tell us a little
about your background – both personal and professional?
Sure. Let’s start with
professional. I spend 29 years at GM,
starting as a GMI (now Kettering University) student in Electrical
Engineering. I got a chance to work at
the new Cadillac Detroit/Hamtramck plant that was under construction, so I went
there for about a year. As the plant started
to launch its new vehicle program, I went to Purdue to get an MSEE.
When I came back, the
plant was STILL in launch, a year and a half later. I was assigned to help solve some of the many
electrical and software issues there were in General Assembly. I fixed a lot of things that were wrong, and
a few made a difference, but most did not. I then got assigned as the
Manufacturing Systems Analyst for the plant, about a year after I got back from
Purdue. The plant was still struggling
with throughput.
The plant manager, Larry
Tibbetts, asked me to go talk to an Operations Research scientist at GM
Research named Dave VanderVeen, after seeing a presentation Dave was showing
around the corporation. Dave gave me a
copy of The Goal, and a disk containing a program called C-Thru, which
helped identify bottlenecks. I read the
entire book in two sessions, and started putting the program to work.
Something odd started to
happen after that. Whenever we fixed a
workstation that was a predicted bottleneck, the throughput of the plant went
up! That was a new concept – prior to
this, we just created long lists of things to fix, and then made a best guess
at what to fix first. Most fixes had no
obvious impact on throughput. We just assumed there was too much variation and
too much complexity to actually predict cause and effect, so this was a
surprise to us. We were pretty excited,
and wanted to keep it going.
So, we created a
continuous improvement process called the Throughput Improvement Process (TIP)
to help keep it going. We also got some
help from an outside TOC consultant, Paul Henderson, who was hired by one of
earliest TOC executive supporters in GM, Rich Rachner.
We got the plant up to
rate soon after that. They asked me to
come to the divisional offices to help set up a team to do this for multiple
plants. We put TIP into more and more
plants, especially right before a product launch. We then started to design new plants using
TOC concepts. We figured out how to
“design in” the bottleneck. Throughput improved, productivity increased,
vehicles that were in demand got out into the markets, launch times decreased –
GM made money. At that time, our stock
prices started to head toward the 90’s.
I became an executive
doing this work, and the program grew and grew. I soon had controls engineers, TIP engineers, simulation engineers, and
lean engineers working for me. Now, it’s in all North American plants, in most
of GM Europe, and GM is rolling out to plants in South America. We didn’t talk about what did outside of GM,
and I wasn’t really allowed to talk about my job much. But the GM Research scientists did some great
work on C-More, so we did decide to try for the INFORMS operations research
Franz Edelman award in 2005. We were up
against some tough competition, including P&G and Eli Lilley, but we won.
All told, our efforts generated an additional $2B in profits for GM while I was
there.
But all good things come
to an end. The constraint moved out into
the market, and I couldn’t get out of manufacturing to help impact this. I got
an opportunity to take a buyout, and decided to try and do TOC on the outside
with my own consulting firm, Bottleneck Busters, LLC (www.bottleneckbusters.com). I also work with PMC in Dearborn (www.pmcorp.com).
Personally, I am married
to Denise, a wonderful, beautiful woman who puts up with me. We live in Novi, Michigan, which is about 30
minutes northwest of downtown Detroit. We don’t have kids, but two dogs and a
cat keep us pretty busy.
